Suwako lashed out with her tongue, straight at my neck.

I wasn’t a melee fighter. Even with Hong Meiling’s training sessions, and Konpaku Youmu’s guidance, I hadn’t really built the reflexes necessary to deal with dodging a close-range attack. I flinched and threw my arm up in the way, which was better than nothing.

Her tongue wrapped around my forearm so tightly it made fingers tingle. Maybe throwing up my hand saved my life.

“WE HAVE A LOT IN COMMON, MISTER THORNE,” rumbled the god’s voice all around us.

“No we don’t!”

“WE BOTH… LIKE… HATS…”

The youkai was transforming right in front of me. Her head fell down into her chest while her hat swelled in size, becoming something lumpy and warty. The gap between her hat and her hair darkened and curled until it was a mouth filled with ridged, rocky teeth. The base of her tongue moved through her dissolving human face to relocate to the new mouth. The spherical eyes on her hat were sucked into muddy black and yellow skin. They glowed as faintly as candles.

Suwako’s lavender outfit bubbled and swelled into a pulsing hide. Her limbs grew longer, splitting and branching in a fungal way, snapping to the ground like cypress roots. The earth also warped, stones of all sizes frothing from the soil beneath her and leaving the ground intact after they passed. She oozed forward, her limbs popping and jerking through the stones grinding against each other. She was a slow rockslide.

I tried to run past, and another tongue sprouted from her mouth in defiance of biology. This wasn’t a fucking frog! My arm twitched toward my notebook.

The second tongue lashed out, and I caught it with my left hand. The pink tentacles yanked me toward her. I despaired. Suwako was undoubtedly about to eat me.

Her massive body reared back and pulled me into the air. Then she rotated her head and sent me flying ten yards away into the water. I remembered: Moriya Suwako was a god, a special type of youkai. She didn’t feed on human flesh or fear. She fed on faith, I thought, as my clothing was soaked through.

Or maybe she fed a bit on both, because a moment later I felt the pressure wave of an immense being jumping in the lake after me. I kicked once to get away before remembering my wings. They extended from my back and helped propel me through the water.

Suwako’s tongues shot toward me like fishing spears, three or more of them. One wrapped around my foot just as I breached the surface. I pulled into the air above the lake. Beneath me I saw the huge not-a-frog’s head looking up at me. She wasn’t flying, she was just big enough to stick up out of the water at the edge of the lake.

I kicked the tongue on my foot. My boot went with it. Then I flew back toward the Moriya Shrine.

Suwako leapt out of the water with a wet crack–a cavitation beneath her from the immense forces–and slapped me back down with a fan of pink tentacles. I took to the air again, slightly dazed. Several tongues found purchase on my clothes and limbs, pulling me toward the surface of the water.

“Now she has… like six,” I said to myself as I tried to wriggle my way out. Nitori and her could talk about limb control.

My wriggling wasn’t working, but I managed to get my hand free. I flew straight up. With a jerking motion Suwako yanked me lower. The most surprising part was that I was strong enough to fight it, even for a moment. It felt like walking against a river’s current, or like trudging up a steep hill, but I was able to resist. I was stronger than I had been.

“Conviction Mines!” coughed up my brain. Red bursts of danmaku formed all around.

It worked immediately. The tongues all disconnected and shot back into the gaping mouth below. The monster shrank back beneath the surface.

“FINE,” reverberated the god’s voice, making the water ripple. “WE CAN DO THIS THE HARD WAY.”

Before I could even think of fleeing, a little blonde girl was flying up toward me. The orange light of the sunset made her wet purple dress seem black, or maybe that was my own biases causing me to reinterpret her appearance. There was some awful shit hiding under that hat. I flinched when she plucked it off her head to wring it out, which made the eyeballs bulge.

“I’ll compel you to drown yourself,” she said in a little girl’s voice. “As is the custom.”

“That’s not any better,” I said as I rubbed my wrist where her tongue had abraded me. “Why don’t you just cleanse me?”

“I’m trying,” she said. “This is the way humans handle their unwanted children, is it not?”

“What the fuck?”

“The deformed and ugly ones? And please, refrain from swearing.” I almost told her to fuck off, but as long as she was talking to me, I was continuing to live. Suwako put her hat back on her head. She was talking about infanticide.

“We don’t do that anymore,” I said.

Not only had humans invented rights, contraceptives, and medical interventions, but we had genetic screening and engineering. Far fewer children had deformities in the Outside World than ever before, and those that did had better treatment. Her view of humanity was several hundred or thousand years out of date. I debated explaining some of this to Suwako to buy more time, but I decided against it. Peace was more likely with a capitulation.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not sure what test I failed, but I’d really rather not be drowned. Is the water magical or something? Can’t I just go for a swim?”

Suwako’s yellow eyebrow went up. “Why does everyone think that?”

“That the water is magical? The kappa are telling people not to go in it.”

“That’s simple. It isn’t theirs. And swimming isn’t enough, you will have to drown.”

“To death?”

“Well. I could tear you limb-from-limb instead… that would also prevent you from becoming a youkai.”

“I can commit to not becoming a youkai!”

She shook her head. “No you can’t. You would not make such a promise for Yukari.” Suwako didn’t use an honorific.

“She never asked me to!” I shouted. I tried to control my voice. “She just told us the punishment was death and went on not explaining a darn thing.” Admittedly, that was more than I’d gotten from Suwako, who didn’t even give humans a fucking warning. I was angry at her, I realized, angry enough to swear in my own thoughts.

“That’s how you view everything,” she said. “A tradeoff. She told you the punishment was death, and you thought ‘perhaps becoming a youkai is something I could buy if I really wanted.’ Nothing is sacred for you; nothing is certain.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. I wasn’t like Byakuren, where I would sacrifice anything for the greater good. However, when I thought about turning myself to a youkai to achieve a goal, it sounded like something she would do.

“That weakness of resolve means you cannot make such a promise,” said the god.

“I have oodles of resolve!” I said. “I can commit to something, when necessary!”

“I can see it in your soul, Jake Thorne. You would promise not to become a youkai, then become one anyway when you thought it would be worthwhile to break your promise.”

She was calling me a failure before I’d even failed. It wasn’t my fault I’d been turning into a monster! Circumstance had just pushed me toward getting stabbed, injured, winged, irradiated, and kissed in such a way that I’d be cursed.

“... I’m not becoming one by choice,” I finally said.

“If I cleanse you it will just delay the inevitable. You are like a stone atop a cliff, promising not to fall.” As she spoke she pulled a bangle off her wrist. It enlarged itself into a giant silver ring of metal with a razor sharp edge. “I’m protecting your friends and loved ones. Sorry, Jake. I am going to drown you.”

“People keep pushing me,” I objected. “Off the cliff, I mean. Why don’t you drown them? Why don’t you just… go down into Hell and solve this incident yourself!”

“They are as much a slave to their nature as you are,” she said. “As am I. I’m a god of the Earth. Not of Hell.”

Suwako flew back, and her voice once again became a rumbling. She didn’t turn into the monster again, at least.

“MISTER THORNE,” she ground out, shaking the pillars. “WHAT ARE YOU BESEECHING ME FOR?” Danmaku battles were a trade, an exchange of goals. I tried to still my pounding heart. I wanted to live; that was my goal.

“Can I have a day or two to put my affairs in order?” I’d use the time to find a way to escape her wrath.

She smirked. “IS THAT ALL YOU WANT?”

“I want you to make me human again. Without killing me.”

“BETTER.” Then she threw the metal ring at me. I dodged it. It bounced off one of the onbashira and came back, going through my leg but not cutting it off. It was danmaku, and I felt the compulsion trying to take hold.

The compulsion was to drown myself.

–

My battle with Suwako was awfully one-sided. She threw the ring repeatedly, but also lit up the lake with bullets. I felt incompetent; probably similar to how she had felt playing video games. It was like the controller kept slipping from my hands.

I hadn’t fought against the other youkai while journeying up the mountain. I had no head of steam. There wasn’t anyone to protect except for myself, so my conviction was lacking. No-one was there to see me battle, so I wasn’t even showing off.

“NATIVE GOD: LONG ARM AND LONG LEG,” said Suwako. She fired a barrage of green and red beams that bounced from the pillars, forcing me toward her, but it was far better than the long ‘arms’ and ‘legs’ she’d shown while transformed.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Then a wave of blue bullets rushed out and I had to dizzyingly reverse direction to avoid running into them. One touched my stomach. I thought that maybe she wouldn’t really drown me, if I just gave in quickly.

The compulsion’s ability to make me lie to myself was terrifying in its own way. I kept pelting her with red danmaku.

“I FEEL YOUR DESIRE TO LIVE,” rumbled Suwako. “A HEALTHY THING. IT BROUGHT YOU TO ME.”

Right into her maw. I did want to live, so I started trying to be creative. I threw my hat straight at Suwako. She ducked, grabbing her own hat so it wouldn’t come off.

“DON’T TREAT YOUR HAT THAT WAY,” reverberated the god’s voice.

“At least it won’t have to drown with me!” I said. The hat was zooming off to find Sasha. She probably couldn’t do anything to help, but she’d bring the crystal and maybe Patchouli could do something. At the very least, if she feared for my life in my presence, I might grow stronger.

“ACTUALLY, THE HAT WILL DROWN ALL THE SAME,” said Suwako. “YOUR ENTIRE IDENTITY IS VULNERABLE TO THAT!”

Now that I’d sent for help, I needed some way to stall her. I needed the strength to buy time. I thought about my mission, and how the entirety of Human Town (might) be at stake. I couldn’t very well save their lives if I let Suwako end me, could I?

That should motivate me!

Another bullet hit me. If I drowned, at least I could finally rest.

“Akiba summer!” I said, shooting out flames. She chuckled.

“A WISER RESPONSE,” she said, even though I was grasping at straws. “PARTY START: TWO BOWS, TWO CLAPS, AND ONE BOW!”

She aimed two streams of bullets at me, one from each hand, which I dodged by flying to the sides. The real problem was the giant globs of lake water that rose behind her and extinguished my own attack. The first two waves missed, but the last one washed over me, dragging me down, and I very nearly didn’t resist.

The next hit would break my will. I wiped the water from my eyes. Conviction for protecting humans wouldn’t do it for me, either. I was too weak–too overpowered. There was no one to protect. She could do whatever she wanted with me. I found myself thinking of Maroon.

The good little fairy had done just what she was told, becoming someone else entirely. So much so that the shock of looking back had killed her. Maybe that’s what Suwako meant about becoming a youkai. In my eagerness to please Okina and Yukari, I was forgetting to preserve myself. What if Yukari had lied? What if my willingness to die was the only reason she’d chosen me? Maybe there would come a day when I’d look back and regret that.

“DIVINE TOOL: MORIYA’S IRON RING.”

Suwako threw out dozens of copies of the metal loop. They sailed back and forth between the pillars, slowly descending. I kept firing at her as best as I could.

“ODD,” she said. “YOU WERE SO EAGER TO PERISH, BEFORE. WHY DO YOU FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE SO FURIOUSLY NOW?”

“I wasn’t!” I said. “Being willing to sacrifice yourself and wanting to die aren’t the same thing at all!”

“HUMANS ARE LITTLE BEHAVIOR EXECUTORS,” she said. “YOU WANT TO LIVE NOW, BUT THE MOMENT SOMEONE IS IN DANGER, YOU’LL RUSH INTO MORTAL PERIL. YOUR SELF-PRESERVATION INSTINCT WILL SLUMBER.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to work, you dumb bitch!” I shouted. “I do value some things more than my life–so yeah, maybe I’d lose my life over them! But I’m not going to waste it here!” Not if I could help it.

“WHEN YOU BECOME A MONSTER, YOU’LL KILL THE SAME FRIENDS YOU WOULD ONCE HAVE SAVED. I HAVE SEEN IT COUNTLESS TIMES.”

My brain scrambled for any solution, any compromise. “Yukari’s gone. So I’ll make a deal with Lady Scarlet, to end me if I betray my cause! I’ll subject myself to monitoring from Doctor Yagokoro–I’ll get Youmu to cut me with the sword of insight so I notice it happening–I’ll tell Sasha and Arnold the risks, so they can stop me!” I glared at her and kept shooting. “Gensokyo has protectors, right? Reimu, and Sanae? If I go bad they can come end me, which is their job! Not yours!”

Suwako descended through the air. She drew near, and chuckled. “That’s a pretty compelling way to argue it,” she said in her girl’s voice. “Clever, too. But I’ve made a commitment as well, to end the curses whenever I see them. Suwa War: Native Myth versus Central Myth!”

Tentacles of bullets sprouted up from the entire lake, waving lazily. I dodged one that came near. Then she threw back her iron ring, like a boomerang, and when it came spinning back there were dozens of glowing red rings of fire. They cut the tentacles, reenacting a battle I knew nothing about.

I was caught in the crossfire. A red ring flew through my chest and heart. As my will faltered, I tasted coffee.

Down at the lake’s edge I saw that Sasha had arrived just in time to see me lose. Sanae was with her but feeling no fear that I could taste. There were other people I didn’t recognize down there as well, in blue, red, and yellow, but it was hard to make them out in the dimming light. I put together that the blue one was Nitori.

That was irrelevant. I felt the compulsion to drown myself take hold and I descended toward the lake. A despair as total as anything I’d ever felt moved through me. I’d lost, and I was about to die, perhaps painfully, but definitely uselessly.

I wanted Sasha and Arnold to complete the mission without me. I felt like I’d failed, though; I knew in my heart of hearts they couldn’t do it alone. I knew Wiki couldn’t head off threats without my intel, from Sekibanki and otherwise.

I knew Maroon would never come back if I died here. Patchouli would be devastated. Sekibanki would be sad, too, even if she was too aloof to admit it. There was nothing I wanted more than to go on living. And still, I could no more stop myself from drowning than I could stop myself from falling out of the sky. This had happened before when I wanted to save Bruno, and I’d gone straight into the water.

Expecting to fail entirely, expecting it to make no difference, I willed myself to stop.

Then I stopped falling.

“Hmm?” asked Suwako. She descended until she was on my level, and hit me with a few blue bullets for good measure. “You lost? Get down there!”

“Killing myself…” I said, not moving. “Drowning myself, for your convenience… that’s not my nature, is it?”

It wasn’t. I might acquiesce to reasonable demands–things I could see myself doing–but there was no way I’d ever want to die pointlessly. Suwako couldn’t compel me to do it. Her head tilted, and she half-smiled.

“I’m glad to learn of this,” she said.

The revelation was a bit of a gut punch. Had the humans who were eaten wanted to be eaten? Had they been tricked in some other way, and we had all been immune to the major drawback of losing danmaku? Or had I somehow crystallized my motivation into something unassailable? Or…

“Am I a youkai now?” I asked Suwako.

She laughed. “What a stubborn human!”

“What a stubborn youkai.” I was talking about her, but maybe she thought I was talking about myself.

“Deciding you’re going to do something, come Hell or high water… that is a very human thing.” She shrugged. “Youkai do what comes naturally. They conform to the ideals that manifest them. Humans, some of them at least, beat themselves up until they do whatever it is they think they want. So the question is, is the outside conception of Jake Thorne someone who won’t respond to a death threat, or is that something you decided to impose on yourself?”

The coffee smell was strong. I looked down toward the shore, where Sasha waited. Next to her the yellow youkai had red horns and something in her arms, and the red one had a mirror on the front of her dress. I recognized the second: it was Yasaka Kanako, the other goddess of the Moriya Shrine. The invader.

None of them were people who believed much of anything about me. Heck, Sasha probably thought I was losing, although the coffee smell was diminishing by the second. I wasn’t a youkai that was expected to resist, I thought.

“I think I’ve chosen this for myself,” I said. “On the other hand, I’m tasting Sasha’s fear right now, and it feels like it’s helping.”

“Thanks for your honesty.” Her metal ring shrank back down into a bracelet. “Well. Danmaku compels youkai better than humans. It isn’t conclusive evidence, but your resistance makes me think you are more human than not.”

“So is falling to a compulsion,” I said. “Humans lose so fast, compared to youkai.”

“A temporary loss. Humans get to try again; youkai do not.” She sighed. “That’s why we’re the transient ones. Existence is change, and we are stuck. If a human or another youkai imposes a change on us, we are just stuck somewhere else.”

“You said you couldn’t change.”

“We can be changed, though,” she said.

“So I am cleansed, then?” I asked Suwako. Her smile slowly sank away. “I’ve changed back into a human?”

“Not at all,” said the not-a-frog youkai. Then she grabbed me and dragged me, kicking and screaming, down toward the water. The coffee smell worsened, and a battle erupted on the lakeside. I was too busy being murdered to do much about it. “This has to be forced on you.”

“This is cheating!” I shouted.

“You lost!” she said. “It’s fair.” My rage returned, ten times stronger than before. I was worthy to live and she was going to drown me anyway!

I punched the goddess, but Suwako wormed her way around me until she had a hold around my neck and armpit. She ruthlessly squeezed, making me see stars. The probably-some-sort-of-bullshit-tentacled-monster youkai ripped off one of my wings, like pulling out a fingernail, and we plummeted. We hit the water’s surface and sank.

So much for danmaku settling battles.

I kept struggling. I would not give in. I tried to fly. I tried to cast danmaku. Nothing worked. I held my breath as long as I could, the fire in my lungs burning worse and worse until its flames touched the wound in my back. I thought out for help, in case anyone could hear me, but no crystal was evident. As my limbs grew heavy and unresponsive, I tried to eat Sasha’s fear to sustain me.

That helped. I wriggled around and began to punch Suwako, my strength returning. She would not let me go!

“STILL YOU FIGHT,” boomed a god’s voice. “YOU WOULD MAKE A PROBLEMATIC YOUKAI INDEED.”

I couldn’t answer–I was holding my breath. But frogs, I knew, also had to breathe. Eventually she’d have to give up. Suwako wasn’t a frog anyway–she was some sort of monstrous Earth god.

Seeing Kanako had reminded me of a bit of lore WIki had conveyed, the night before. The divine lake was Kanako’s, not Suwako’s. The former was a goddess of wind and rain, the latter was her defeated enemy-turned-ally. Even in her monstrous form, Suwako had kept her head above water. Suwako was trying to drown me in borrowed power.

Since she thought drowning was how you killed people, I bet Kanako would bury ‘em.

Above, a battle raged. Below, we held each other. Suwako didn’t strike me, and I tried to conserve my breath-from-fear. After about sixty seconds, I suspected I had the right of things. I was tasting something gritty and rotten. Something that filled my mouth, making my stomach churn painfully.

I was eating the fear of a god. As soon as I’d noticed Suwako let me go and started to kick toward the surface. I grabbed her foot.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Drowning her. Turnabout's fair play. It felt like I was eating mud, but my strength only grew. The taste was improving.

“LET ME GO!”

No.

The Earth rumbled loud, making the water squeeze my temples painfully. “SANAE!” groaned the mountain. “GET THE WOMAN AWAY FROM HERE!”

Almost immediately the coffee taste receded. Sasha had lost her danmaku battle, and so was being compelled to leave. It didn’t matter. The chain reaction was already going.

I grabbed Suwako’s other leg and held her back. My fingers were cracking with my strength. I didn’t need my ally anymore; my prey’s fear was enough. I knew that if she got back to the surface, she’d recover much more than I would. Then she would kill me. My only hope was to eat her before she could do that.

Defeat her, I meant. She worked a foot free and kicked my nose, so I yanked her back down.

There was a crack, as the girl’s ankle broke in my hands. I laughed, and some bubbles escaped my nose. The stupid bitch had accomplished exactly the opposite of what she intended.

I would kill her. My killing intent suffused the water like acid. I could almost see it.

“I AM A GOD!” rumbled the stones and dirt beneath me. “HOW CAN YOU KILL A GOD? WHAT A GRAND AND INTOXICATING INNOCENCE.”

Before I could parse that, her fear taste vanished. Suwako’s body transformed into solid stone and crushed me down into the lakebed. She was smaller than me, but once she was made of rock she weighed hundreds of pounds.

Mud squelched around me, constricting me so much that I couldn’t breath even if there had been air. Even that I might have survived, with the flow of the god’s power, except for one thing.

Suwako had stopped manifesting at all. Nobody on the surface knew what was going on. I could taste the four youkai there–like a faint, distant scent of somewhat-burned saffron-seasoned turtle and beef stew–but they weren’t feeling fear. There was no power for me to steal.

I could not move, and I was weak once more. My last thought was despair, because I’d given everything trying to win and lost anyway. My consciousness failed before I felt the water enter my lungs.

I died as a youkai for no reason whatsoever.